How Is the Godless West Working Out?

Dennis Prager:

Some recent developments in the godless West:

The supreme court of Italy last week ruled that public masturbation is legal (except in front of minors).

The New York city council voted last month to legalize public urination.

The San Francisco city council decided by one vote to continue the city’s ban on public nudity — not, of course, on the grounds of “decency,” but on the grounds of public health. Since that can easily be resolved by use of a towel on public benches and chairs, it is only a matter of time — probably a couple of years — before people will be permitted to walk around naked in San Francisco.

A few weeks ago, the city of Charlotte, N.C., instructed its teachers not to refer to their elementary-school students as “boys and girls,” but as “students” and “scholars”(!). The reasons are presumably 1) the need for inclusivity (there might be a student who has no gender identity) and 2) the belief that adults should not impose a gender identity on young people.

In a New York Times op-ed column, a professor of philosophy noted his shock at learning that most young Americans do not believe that moral truths exist. They are incapable of asserting that anything — including “killing for fun” — is wrong, beyond personal opinion.

These are all inevitable consequences of the death of God, of Judeo-Christian values, and of the Bible as society’s primary moral reference work.

The West has been in moral decline since World War I — the calamity that led not only to World War II but to the death of national identity and Christianity in most of Europe.

There has always been one exception — the United States. But now that is ending. The seeds of America’s decline have been sown since the beginning of the 20th century; and they came to fruition with the post–World War II generation — the baby boomers.

Radical and aggressive secularism and atheism have replaced religion in virtually every school and throughout public life in America.

We have gone from President Abraham Lincoln reading the Bible every day to Alaska Airlines feeling forced to stop placing a Biblical verse on its meal trays. In a hundred years, we’ve gone from near-total Biblical literacy to near-total Biblical illiteracy.

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